Life

Kolmogorov’s mother died giving him birth; he was raised by her sister and took his maternal grandfather’s family name. His aunt moved with him to Moscow when he was seven years old, where he demonstrated an early interest in biology and history. In 1920, as yet undecided over a career, he enrolled simultaneously at Moscow State University to study history and mathematics and at the Mendeleev Chemical Engineering Institute to study metallurgy. However, he soon revealed a remarkable talent for mathematics and specialized in that subject. As a 19-year-old student he was entrusted with teaching mathematics and physics courses in the Potylikhin Experimental School, and by the time he graduated in 1925 he had published 10 mathematical papers, most of them on trigonometric series—an extraordinary output for a student. This astonishing outburst of mathematical creativity continued as a graduate student with eight more papers written through 1928. He later expanded the most important of these papers, “General Theory of Measure and Probability Theory”—which aimed to develop a rigorous, axiomatic foundation for probability—into an influential monograph Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung (1933; Foundations of the Theory of Probability, 1950). In 1929, having completed his doctorate, Kolmogorov was elected a member of the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics at Moscow State University, with which he remained associated for the rest of his life. In 1931, following a radical restructuring of the Moscow mathematical community, he was elected a professor. Two years later he was appointed director of the Mathematical Research Institute at the university, a position he held until 1939 and again from 1951 to 1953. In 1938 he was chosen to head the new department of probability and statistics at the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in Moscow (now the Russian Academy of Sciences), a position that he held until 1958. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1939, and between 1946 and 1949 he was also the head of the Turbulence Laboratory of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences Institute of Theoretical Geophysics in Moscow.

Mathematical research

Of the many areas of pure and applied mathematical research to which Kolmogorov contributed, probability theory is unquestionably the most important, in terms of both the depth and breadth of his contributions. In addition to his work on the foundations of probability, he contributed profound papers on stochastic processes, especially Markov processes. In Markov processes only the present state has any bearing upon the probability of future states; states are therefore said to retain no “memory” of past events. Kolmogorov invented a pair of functions to characterize the transition probabilities for a Markov process and showed that they amount to what he called an “instantaneous mean” and an “instantaneous variance.” Using these functions, he was able to write a set of partial differential equations to determine the probabilities of transition from one state to another. These equations provided an entirely new approach to the application of probability theory in physics, chemistry, civil engineering, and biology. To note just two examples, in 1937 Kolmogorov published a paper on the use of statistical theory to study the process of crystallization, and the following year he published a paper on mathematical biology using a branching stochastic process to describe the asymptotic probability of extinction of a species over a large number of generations.

Kolmogorov’s interest in problems of turbulence in fluids (turbulent flow) arose in the late 1930s, when he realized that the recently developed stochastic field theory would be relevant to these problems. In 1941 and 1942 he contributed four papers to this area, in which his contributions were multiplied by a talented group of collaborators working under his direction.

During the 1930s, while continuing a prolific output of papers on particular mathematical topics, Kolmogorov began to write articles on methodological questions involving the theories of real analysis and probability. He also began to write expository articles for encyclopedias and journals aimed at a popular audience. After the end of World War II, established as one of the leading Soviet mathematicians, he began writing articles of historical and philosophical content. During the 1950s he contributed more than 80 articles to the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

In the mid-1950s Kolmogorov began to work on problems of information theory. He was inspired, in part, by the earlier nonrigorous work of the American engineer Claude Shannon. Working with Israil Gelfand and Akiva Yaglom, he was able to give a mathematical definition of the notion of quantity of information. In the 1960s he began writing articles on automata theory and theory of algorithms. The breadth of his culture and interests is shown by articles that he wrote at this time on the metrical structure of some of the masterpieces of Russian poetry.

The late 1960s marked Kolmogorov’s entrance into the theory of pedagogy, in which he was enormously influential through his textbooks and his service as a member of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. He cowrote and reviewed school textbooks and actively participated in reforming the mathematics curriculum in Soviet schools. Though suffering from Parkinson’s disease and nearly blind during the last few years of his life, he continued to take an active interest in the mathematical world until he died.

Legacy

Kolmogorov was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Stalin Prize (1941), a Lenin Prize (1965), a Wolf Prize (1980), and a Lobachevsky Prize (1987).

The breadth of Kolmogorov’s creative output can be discerned from a list of more than 500 articles and books that he published between 1923 and 1977. The depth of his work reveals itself in the objects that he studied, all of which involved concepts central to mathematics. He seemed to be attracted instinctively by problems whose fundamental importance was recognized by the mathematical community.

Inspire your inbox –
Sign up for daily fun facts about this day in history, updates, and special offers.

By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Click here to view our Privacy Notice. Easy unsubscribe links are provided in every email.

Thank you for subscribing!

Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.